Aren't All African Languages Closely Related?

Well, yes and no. The African continent is linguistically very divers, containing as many as 2,000 languages, some of which are closely related, while others are totally unrelated.

You see, the languages of the world are divided into major "families", which in turn are divided into sub-families, and sub-sub-families, and so on (for example, English is in the Indo-European family, which also includes French, German, and Greek). It's rather like your own extended family: you have immediate family members, close relatives, and distant relatives.

In Africa, there are so many different languages that it can get rather complicated trying to sort out all the family members. But to simplify things, I'll just give you a quick overview of the major language families in Africa (as accepted by most linguists).

• The Niger-Congo language family is the largest one in the world, including around 1500 languages all across the southern half of Africa. On the map below, the Niger-Congo family is conveniently divided in two groups, A (red) and B or Bantu (orange). We are currently working with several languages in the Niger Congo A group.
• The Afroasiatic language family (blue) includes around 375 languages, spoken in north and eastern Africa. The family includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic as well as many African tribal languages. We are currently working with two different Afroasiatic languages.
  
• The Nilo-Saharan language family (yellow) includes about 200 languages, spoken in central and eastern Africa. We are currently working with several languages in this family.
• The Khoisan language family (green) includes only around 25 languages, since many of them have become extinct (i.e. they are no longer spoken as a mother tongue by anyone in the world). This family includes some of the rarest and most fascinating languages on the continent. They are famous for their wide variety of "click" sounds. One language called Ju/'hoan (don't ask me how to pronounce that!) has 77 different consonant sounds, of which 44 are clicks! By the way, English has only 24 different consonant sounds! Anyway, these languages are mostly spoken in Botswana and Angola. We aren't currently working with any of them.
  

So, to get back to the original question, are African languages all closely related? As you can see, it is more complicated than a simple yes or no! God has put a great deal of variety into human languages. While some are very similar to each other, others are not so similar or even completely different.

For a complete listing of the language families of the world, go to this page in the Ethnologue (a major authority on languages and linguistics). For statistics on the different families, go to this page in the same site.